A
LANDSCAPE FOR THE NEW MILLENIUM - SLOBODAN SNAJDER:
CROATIAN PLAYWRIGHT - PAJ 20.3 (1998) 76-78
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Slobodan
Snajder, the Croatian playwright who was born in 1948
and lives in Zagreb, wrote in the foreword to his first
internationally-acclaimed 1982 play Croatian Faust:
"This play filled with hatred has an opposite intent--that
is, to inspire love and tolerance." (Croatian Faust
is based on events that occurred during the opening
night of Goethe's Faust in Nazi-occupied Zagreb in 1942.)
Pointing at the root of the evil in his ethnically diverse
country, Snajder identified the cancerous virus--extreme
nationalism and ethnic hatred--that was keeping Yugoslavia's
wounds unhealed after the Second World War. When in
Croatian Faust Snajder raised his artistic voice against
all forms of intolerance and xenophobia not only in
the former Yugoslavia, but in Europe as well, he declared
his ongoing polemic with the Yugoslavian cultural, artistic,
and political establishment on many issues concerning
Yugoslavian and European traumas.
Snajder,
like many other intellectuals and influential public
figures of that period, believed that divisions according
to ethnic lines and destruction in the name of blood
and soil were of the past. To many of them the future
seemed brighter. Unfortunately, history proved them
wrong. All those ghosts from the shameful past that
Snajder had named so graphically in his Croatian Faust
reappeared on the complex and ethnically-confrontational
Yugoslavian stage in forms not seen before in Europe,
which seemed incapable of stopping this dance macabre.
Snajder might have singled out the evil and pleaded
for love again, but obviously aware that there is no
more time for love in the time of death, he did not
respond to the horror in a predictable way. Instead,
Snajder, that restless theatre tribune that many would
like to see silenced because of his outcry against totalitarian
madness in Europe, took a different path. Disgusted
with ideological and religious confrontations that beget
nationalistic extremism and violence, and appalled by
the often destructive division of power in male-dominated
society, Snajder once again tried to reinvent his idea
of theatre and the idea of the world around him as well.
To
that end, Snajder created a new work with a very specific
ecology of theatre, where space, time, flora, fauna,
and humans interact in a very special relationship.
Snajder turns to the Bosnian part of hell in his pursuit
of a new hopeful environment. He uses the Bosnian tragedy
as a core of the topographical and chronological landscape-metaphor
in his recent, most profound depiction on the violent
transformation of humanity. The result of his creative
attempt to trace new maps and to envision a more humane
world culture is Snake Skin, his disturbing 1994 theatrical
discourse on human metamorphosis.
Snajder's
narrative takes the form of a poetic, nightmarish, grotesque
drama where one discovers a thick forest of signs and
symbols and where fiction and reality blend in unbelievable
ways, past and present interact, cultures clash, environments
are transformed into unseen landscapes, politics and
ideals fight over the future, violence and poetry confront
each other, irony and bitterness overshadow naïveté
and narrow-mindedness. Snajder sets Snake Skin in an
abandoned hospital morgue, which was once an autopsy
lab somewhere in war-torn Bosnia. He brings together
three victims of the Balkan madness, a variety of religious,
historical, and mythical figures, and a number of animals
and plants. He draws from the huge archive of his country's
past and present to build his poetic discourse upon
two complementary segments. One is a well-known Bosnian
fairy-tale of Serbian roots, told in Croatian, which
narrates a story about a woman who is afraid to give
birth to a snake that can transform itself at night
into a handsome young man and which can be kept young
only if its skin is burned at its time of shedding.
The other segment is the poignant and actual Bosnian
reality where warlords, criminals, and war profiteers
decide the fate of the Bosnian people, and where violence,
rape, and ethnic cleansing during the civil war has
placed the "gods" and the owners of life and
death in opposition to each other in their old new war.
In
that acrid setting, framed by the thirty-year war in
which nature and culture intermingle, where human screams,
gunfire, and the howls of wolves cohabit in past and
present time, Snajder does not search for the sources
of evil and pain. He has already named these beasts
many times: they are totalitarian blindness, nationalism
and bigotry, religious and ideological dogmatism of
all sorts. Instead, he transforms his theatrical environment,
the cold and stony morgue, the dark wood where all speak
the same language, into a landscape of human despair
which might be healed by a mother's love.
Snake
Skin may be seen as his noble attempt to pave the road
to a creative landscape where nature and humans live
in harmony, a landscape for the time to come. The initial
aesthetic point in Snajder's attempt for his new ecology
of theatre is rooted in the idea of human resistance
to any form of militant extremism, in resistance to
nationalism's distortion of tradition and history, and
in the belief in the integrative power of multiculturalism.
Aware of the failure of traditional social structures
based on the patriarchal concept of society, he encourages
possibilities for a new social structure based on the
mother principle. Furthermore, his vision is reflected
in the aesthetic idea of the theatre as a landscape,
an environment, a new aesthetic entity as a metaphor
for the more humane world-culture in the new millennium.
The
question remains: Is the road to the future paved by
gravestones? Is the exit from the Bosnian, Yugoslavian,
European poisonous cycle of conflicts to be found on
the other side of the Bosnian cemetery, with its rows
of Catholic and Orthodox crosses and its Muslim turbans
covered with snow--the final image of Snake Skin?
